


wearied perhaps but strenuous certainly

by SerenePanic



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 12:20:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10100522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenePanic/pseuds/SerenePanic
Summary: Pidge, at 14, is lost to her family, fighting a war in space she never asked to be part of.She's tired.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Christina G. Rossetti's "In Progress"

Pidge hates this blank feeling.

This “I know I feel bad and generally not good but it’s too much energy to be properly sad and I used all the energy I had for temporary sensations of genuine joy” feeling.

Her arms are tingling, and her fingers feel like they’re losing circulation, because she’s just so tired. Her head hurts, and her chest is heavy.

Physical contact would help, probably, but she doesn’t want it from any of the others on the ship. She wants a hug from her mother. She wants to sit next to her father, nestled under his shoulder, watching him do work and listening to him explain it to her. She wants her brother to sit next to her on the couch so she can lean into him and fall asleep watching kid cartoons with him.

She wants her family, but she knows she has to find them before any of that could ever happen again—

But that’s so much energy, and she just has nothing left to spare. Her fingers are tingling, and the tips of her ears are starting to feel like they’re drifting off her head, and her stomach feels like a rock and her chest feels like there’s a sack on it and her neck is tense and sore and her eyes are burning and she’s tired and _sad_ and it’s all just so much and she’s too tired to sort through it all.

She’s just tired. Her shoulders slump, and she leans her head against the wall as she stares blankly at the opposite wall. She’s supposed to be analyzing data, right now, and she has all the files open right in front of her, but for whatever reason she can’t bring herself to actually look at them. She doesn’t know if she’s scared of what she’ll find, or if she’s just too tired to really pay attention.

(She shouldn’t be this tired, she knows. She’s been sleeping almost regularly, recently, wherever and whenever she can. Still, her bones feel heavy and slow and she doesn’t want to move.)

She hates feeling like this. She hates how blank and hazy everything feels, how easy it is for her to lose time, how disconnected she feels from people who are literally sitting across the room from her. The only things that exist are the things immediately touching her—the wall. Her seat. The blanket, draped across her legs. Her laptop. Intellectually, she knows everything else around her—her water, the other instruments set up, the piles of wires and other junk that she sometimes thinks might be important—is there, but it’s hard to put that into reality, when she’s like this.

She wants human contact, because she wants to remember that she exists on the same plane as others.

She wants her family, because she’s _fourteen_ and she misses them and she just.

She wants to go home.

But she knows she can’t, and she hates that, too, almost as much as she hates feeling like this.

(This? What is this?)

(A cloud of haze, a fogbank—visible, but noncorporeal and unable to interact with the environment. A ghost. Permanently temporary.)


End file.
